Research Assessment #8

The usage of medicine has always been prominent throughout human civilizations, from local herbs used as anesthetics to complex books written on how to compound various medicines with varying effects. As time has gone on, humanity has discovered and created more medicines of differing strengths, effects, and side effects. Again another discovery has been made in the field of anesthetics.The most common method of numbing finger pain was to inject two injections of said anesthetic into the back of the patient’s hand. However, some researchers wondered if there was a way to lessen the amount of medication to one injection. So what the researchers did was inject the back of the hands of various patients with finger pain with 2 injections on the back of the hand or 1 injection straight into the palm.

The most common method of numbing finger pain was to inject two injections of said anesthetic into the back of the patient’s hand. However, some researchers wondered if there was a way to lessen the amount of medication to one injection. So what the researchers did was inject the back of the hands of various patients with finger pain with 2 injections on the back of the hand or 1 injection straight into the palm.

Now what’s fascinating to me about this experiment is that there is no concrete data. What I mean by that is that this revolves around the patients and their various responses to how much pain the needles suppress. This is a mainly patient-centered experiment, and therefore the patient is put first, not the results. The fact that they base their results on patients is really important to me because I want to help the people. If this type of technique is able to save on medication and lessen the pain, I am willing to invest more time and effort into learning about this research.

With that all said, it must be noticed that this is research is still ongoing. After all, it is improper to propose such an important statement with not many results. As for the patient-centered labs, unfortunately, I don’t think that will be enough to prove the researchers’ hypothesis. A patient-centered lab, as I stated before, revolves around the patient and his or her statements, and while it somewhat pains me to say this, the data obtained from people’s mouths is somewhat skewed. People may not truly know which technique lessens the pains more as their level of tolerance and pain may be different each time they are tested. Instead, for this hypothesis to be proven true, there must be valid scientific proof. For example, the researchers must be able to observe less pain and to do that they must be able to observe the nerves themselves and the neurotransmitters they send back and forth to lessen pain. However, this is somewhat hard to observe as measuring the sheer number of electrical signals move back and forth to see how much pain is being felt is practically impossible. However, there may be another way to observe the lessening of pain that I do not know of. Because of this, I will continue to pay attention to this kind of research to see how far they advance, as well as how much they can benefit humanity.